Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Opting Out

By

Just wanted to share that next week while thousands of New Jersey school children will be subjected to the annual ASK standardized tests, my 12-year old son Tucker will not be among them. We made a formal request to opt out, which is our legal right in NJ, and he’ll be staying home during the testing periods. (The absences are excused, btw.)

Wendy and I came to this decision after seriously considering the potential effects for the school and after some serious conversations with Tuck. Obviously, he didn’t mind the staying home part, but he did have concerns about what others might say or think. I’m thinking that won’t be a problem, but we wanted to make sure that in the end he was on board, and he is.

Below is a letter that we’re sending to the local paper and to nj.com. It articulates our reasoning and, I hope, might get other parents and community members to start some conversations around the tests. Just fyi, as a courtesy, I’ve already sent a copy to the principal at Tucker’s school to make sure she didn’t have any issues.

Interested in your thoughts, as always.

To the Editor:

After much thought, we have decided to keep our son home during the 7th Grade NJ ASK standardized assessments that are being given in his school next week. It is our legal right to do so, and we are basing this decision on our serious concerns about what the test itself is doing to our son’s opportunity to receive a well-rounded, relevant education, and because of the intention of state policy makers to use the test in ways it was never intended to be used. These concerns should be shared by every parent and community member who wants our children to be fully prepared for the much more complex and connected world in which they will live, and by those who care about our ability to flourish as a country moving forward.

Our current school systems and assessments were created for a learning world that is quickly disappearing. In his working life, my son will be expected to solve real world problems, create and share meaningful work with the world, make sense of reams of unedited digital information, and regularly work with others a half a world away using computers and mobile devices. The NJ ASK tells us nothing about his ability or preparedness to do that. The paper and pencil tasks given on the test provide little useful information on what he has learned that goes beyond what we can see for ourselves on a daily basis and what his teachers relay to us through their own assessments in class. We implicitly trust the caring professionals in our son’s classroom to provide this important, timely feedback as opposed to a single data point from one test, data that is reported out six months later without any context for areas where he may need help or remediation. In short, these tests don’t help our son learn, nor do they help his teachers teach him. 

In addition, the test itself poses a number of problems:

  • Over the years, the “high stakes” nature of school evaluation has narrowed instruction to focus on only those areas that are tested. This has led to reductions in the arts, languages, physical education and more.
  • Research has shown that high scores can be achieved without any real critical thinking or problem solving ability.
  • The huge amount of tax dollars that are being spent on creating, delivering and scoring the tests, dollars that are going to businesses with, no surprise, powerful lobbyists in the state capitol and in Washington, DC, is hugely problematic.
  • Proposals to use these test scores for up to 50% of a teacher’s evaluation are equally problematic. The tests were not created for such a use, and to create even higher stakes for the NJ ASK will only create more test prep in our classrooms at the expense of the relevant, authentic, real world learning that our students desperately need.
  • These tests create unnecessary anxiety and stress in many students who feel immense pressure to do well.

In no way are we taking this step because of our dissatisfaction with our son’s public school, the teachers and administrators there, or our school board. We have simply had enough of national and state policies that we feel are hurting the educational opportunities for all children. At the end of the day, we don’t care what our son scores on a test that doesn’t measure the things we hold most important in his education: the development of his interest in learning, his ability to use the many resources he has at his disposal to direct his own learning, and his ability to work with others to create real world solutions to the problems we face. And we feel our tax dollars are better spent supporting our schools and our teachers who will help him reach those goals as well as the goals detailed by the state standards in ways that are more relevant, engaging and important than four days of testing could ever accomplish.

Will and Wendy Richardson

Delaware Township

Test Scores = Learning

By

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was on the Cornel West NPR radio show recently, and I just wanted to point to one snip that I think clearly shows that problem we’re having when it comes to how we define learning. Here’s Duncan:

Secondly, on the test scores, it’s a really, really important point.  We could spend a whole conversation on it.  I think if test scores are the only things people are focused on, that’s a real problem.  I think test scores should be part of a balance.  We think “no child left behind” was broken.  There was far too much reliance on a single test score.  We wanted Congress to fix “no child left behind” and work in a bipartisan way.

That didn’t happen so you know we actually went out and partnered directly with states and provided waivers to give them more flexibility.  [They’re] accountability systems, Dr. West, they’re moving way beyond a focus on an absolute test score.  They’re looking at growth and gain; they’re looking at how much students are improving each year.  

But very importantly, they’re looking at increasing graduation rates and reducing dropout rates and looking at what percentage of students who graduate from high school are going on to college.  And are they going to college having to take remedial classes, meaning they’re not ready, or are they really ready?  And are they persevering.

I always talk everywhere I go whether it’s evaluating a child or a teacher, which is your question, or a school or just a core state, I always say we have to look at multiple measures.  If anyone thinks 100 percent of a teacher evaluation should be based on test score, I will always fight that.  But I will also say that a piece of a teacher’s evaluation has to be upon whether those students are learning or not. [Emphasis mine.]

And there you have it, in those last two sentences, the huge problem that we are facing when it comes to changing the conversation around reform. The Secretary doesn’t understand that learning is much more than what is indicated on the test, and that learning is a much more complex interaction that is not easy to test for in a standardized, common way. 

Equally problematic is how he defends the idea that waivers are providing flexibility. True, it’s not just “an absolute test score” that’s used to grade schools or teachers or custodial services. (Joke.) It’s “growth and gain” and “improvement”…as measured by the absolute test score year to year. So now instead of just focusing on test scores, states can focus on test scores. There’s a switch.

I know it’s a huge undertaking to try to get politicians and parents to unlearn and relearn what learning is and the ways it can most effectively be assessed. That it’s different from “knowing” in the sense that we know the answer to the test. That it’s more about learning dispositions and practices than anything else. But I think we have to continue to push back against those who are trying to simplify it for the sake of efficiency and economics. Test scores do not equal learning.

By

Really thought-provoking talk from danah boyd, primarily about how in the competition for attention we want to promote fear, and that social media perpetuates this. The general text for the talk is also worth the read. Here’s one rather long snip that gets to the heart:

In the 1970s, the scholar Herbert Simon argued that “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”

His arguments give rise both to the notion of “information overload” but also to the “attention economy.” In the attention economy, people’s willingness to distribute their attention to various information stimuli create value for said stimuli.  Indeed, the economic importance of advertisements is predicated on the notion that getting people to pay attention to something has value.

News media is tightly entwined with the attention economy.  Newspapers try to capture people’s attentions through headlines.  TV and radio stations try to entice people to not change the channel.  And, indeed, there is a long history of news media leveraging fear to grab attention, often with a reputational cost. Yellow journalism tarnished newspapers’ credibility with scary headlines intended to generate sales.  The history of radio and television is sullied with propaganda as political ideologues leveraged social psychology to shape the public’s opinion.

Now, along comes social media… Needless to say, social media brings with it massive quantities of information – unscripted, unedited, and uncurated.  Going online is like swimming in an ocean of information.  The very notion of being able to consume everything is laughable, although many people are still struggling to come to terms with “information overload."  Some respond by avoiding environments where they’ll be exposed to too much information. Others try to develop complicated tactics to achieve balance.  Still others are miserable failing to find a way of dealing with information that is comfortable for them. (Don’t worry: there are lots of self-help books out there.)

The amount of information being produced overwhelmingly exceeds the amount of information you can possibly pay attention to.  My favorite response to this is what computer scientist Michael Bernstein describes as going “Twitter Zen.”  This is the happy state people reach when they let go of control and just embrace the information firehose. 

This shift is relatively new which is what causes so much consternation.  A few years ago, my brother and I were going through some old stuff at my mother’s house when we came across a book that he had purchased in 1994.  It was a Yellow Pages for the Internet.  We burst out laughing because the very notion that you could capture all webpages in a physical directory is absolutely ridiculous today.  And yet, somehow, people still think that they should read all blog posts in their feed readers or all tweets in their Twitter stream.  In fact, most of our tools are designed to make us feel guilty when we’ve left things "unread." 

No matter how we feel about the massive amounts of information, one thing’s clear: the amount of information is not going to decline any time soon. Given the increase of information and media, those who want people to consume their material are fighting an uphill battle to get their attention.  Anyone who does social media marketing knows how hard it is to capture people’s attention in this new ecosystem. 

The more stimuli there are competing for your attention, the more that attention seekers must fight to capture your attention.  More often than not, this results in psychological warfare as attention-seekers leverage any and all emotions to draw you in.

There is much here to discuss and study and debate, but for me, at least, this all has a lot of resonance to the ongoing conversations about education and "reform.” We’re told we should be scared of other countries beating us, of incompetent teachers, or failing schools and more. Maybe in order to get our version of events heard, we have to articulate fear as well, as in fear of what standardization is doing to our children, our society, and our country. Or… 

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)

https://willrichardson.com/really-thought-provoking-talk-from-danah-boyd/

Redefining Our Value

By

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking more and more that the biggest challenge we face as educators is redefining our value as schools and classrooms and teachers, not just to the taxpaying public but to ourselves as well. It’s becoming more and more apparent to me that unless we are able to articulate and manifest that shift, we really do risk losing much of what is meaningful and important about the school experience for our kids. 

And there is an urgency to this now that I’m not sure many are feeling. Recently, I heard a well respected author say during a presentation “We all know that kids don’t learn anything that we don’t teach them.” And I heard another wildly successful author about school practice comment that what we need to do to improve schools is to focus more on the techniques of direct instruction, using technology sparingly and on the edges. 

Here’s the point: if we see direct instruction as our value, if what we care about is “higher student achievement” in the context of passing the test, we are, in a word, screwed.

The reality? Technology will soon provide a better “learning” experience to kids needing to pass the test than a classroom teacher with 30 (or 50) kids. Self-paced, formatively assessed, personalized to each student’s needs. I wrote about Knewton a couple of weeks ago, and just a couple of days ago came news that they’ve joined forces with Pearson to create an individualized data-driven learning platform that will no doubt spawn a host of other startups in the education space. Read it, and most likely, weep:

Students in these courses use the computer during class time to work through material at their own speed. Through diagnostics taken along the way, the program creates a “personalized learning path” that targets exactly what lessons they need to work on and then delivers the appropriate material. Points, badges and other game mechanics theoretically keep students chugging through courses with more motivation. In the meantime, teachers learn which students are struggling with exactly which concepts.

If this is what we value, teachers will be reduced to folks who fill in the blanks that the software can’t…yet. Or to put it another way (again), if this is what we value, we don’t need teachers any more, nor do we need schools. And to be honest, it’s not hard to see a whole bunch of policy makers and businessmen who are just salivating at that prospect. I know that schools aren’t going away any time soon, (what would we do with our kids?) but our current concept of schools (or at least our greatest wish for schools) as places of inspiration and inquiry and joy in learning will die a quick death. 

I think Peggy Orenstein captures this pretty well in her column in the Times this week which described the tension between test scores and learning at a New Hampshire middle school that was featured in the paper earlier:

In the end, I guess, I believe in the quality, competence and creativity of her teachers. And perhaps that’s a type of faith worth having, one that in public education is being permanently (and sometimes understandably) eroded. Linda Rief, one of the Oyster River teachers, told Mr. Winerip that she feared “public schools where teachers are trusted to make learning fun are on the way out.”

“Ms. Rief understands that packaged curriculums and standardized assessments offer schools an economy of scale that she and her kind cannot compete with,” Mr. Winerip writes.

There is an urgency now to redefine our value. We cannot be about passing the test. We cannot be about content to the extent we are today because content is everywhere. We cannot be about a curriculum that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. Something else can do that now, and in some ways, that’s a good thing. We have to be about the thing that technology cannot and will not be able to do, and that’s care deeply for our kids as humans, help them develop passions to learn, solve problems that are uniquely important to them, understand beauty and meaning in the world, help them play and create and apply knowledge in ways that add to the richness of life, and develop empathy and deep contextual understanding of the world. And more. 

To me, at least, our profession is in trouble not because of the technology, but because of the current expectations we have of schools. We need to start these conversations around redefinition today, shift this thinking now, not tomorrow. We need to make the case to parents and board members and policy makers and each other that while technology may now serve as a better option for kids needing to learn discrete skills or facts to pass the test, our great value is to cultivate and help develop those uniquely human dispositions and abilities that in the end will allow our kids to use what they know in ways that can make this world a better place and hopefully, save us from ourselves. And that that is an opportunity for change that we cannot waste.

There is an urgency now, for if what we as a society continue to value is the test, we’re lost.

National Tests Yield Few Results

By

Heavily testing students and relying on their scores in order to hold schools – and in some cases teachers – accountable has become the norm in education policy. The No Child Left Behind Act, the largest piece of education legislation on the federal level, for example, uses performance on math and reading exams to gauge whether schools are failing or succeeding – and which schools are closed or phased out.

“Incentives are powerful, which means they don’t always do what they want them to do,” said Kevin Lang, a committee member who also chairs Boston University’s economics department. “As applied so far, they have not registered the type of improvements that everyone has hoped for despite the fact that it’s been a major thrust of education reform for the last 40 years.”

The tests educators rely on are often too narrow to measure student progress, according to the study. The testing system also failed to adequately safeguard itself, the study added, providing ways for teachers and students to produce results that seemed to reflect performance without actually teaching much.

That last sentence, the idea that we have a system that allows us to produce results without actually teaching much, is a huge indictment of the current educational framework. I’m starting to think more and more that the assessment “problem” is where we should be spending our energies more and more.